I don't know how many fans of either Glee and/or Johnathan Coulton are here on E, but either/or will probably have heard of a minor fiasco that's turning into a fairly large PR blunder for Fox, and a rather hilarious story with a happy ending.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Coulton, musician, made an accoustic cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby Got Back song. In one of the recent episodes of Glee, the show used the JoCo (as he's called) cover, including his arrangement, his modified lyrics, and possibly even his raw audio (evidence inconclusive). At no point did they give him credit for anything related to the song.

Yeeeah, as I commented over on the Escapist when I first heard about it, this basically just means I've transitioned from "content to pretend Glee doesn't exist" to "actively dislikes Glee." More so after reading about what a dick the show's creator is toward musicians who don't agree to license their music to the show.

They actually used his audio, too. A lot of the "flavor" that JoCo put in his cover, Glee kept. Even the parts where JoCo references himself, they left in during the very first airing of this episode. The audio has since been edited, and you won't find it on current versions available for streaming... but if a JoCo fan found themselves subjected to this episode of Glee - there's zero question that Glee didn't edit/improve/change ANYTHING from JoCo's version.

They kept his lyrics, yeah, but did anyone actually manage to confirm the audio theft? The key element was the duck quacking to block out profanity, last I checked even JoCo wasn't certain if he could hear the duck in the background.

I've read a lot about this topic, since I'm something of a Coulton fan, and I'm something of a network non-fan.

It appears that absolutely nothing on Glee (music or dance moves) is original to the show.

They will do covers of famous songs with the exact same arrangement. Or they'll do less-famous covers of those songs that they can pass off as their own (no credit for the new arrangements anywhere official). And for the dance moves, one Hollywood choreographer has mentioned that he's been approached more than once to work with the show, but that instead of asking for new moves to go with the music, they want their choreographers to take dance moves created by someone else and use that step by step adjusted to fit their cast. He refuses and calls what they want the equivalent of taking a book that's in the public domain and copying it word for word and republishing it.

Coulton hasn't updated his blog regarding this, despite the fact that he figured he'd have an update the next week after his post about how he was going to protest this treatment by releasing the cover of the cover. And now he's on a boat, so he'll be incommunicado until the JoCo Crazy Cruise returns to port in a week.

That silence makes me suspect that there is actually some merit to the accusation that Glee used his actual audio tracks, which is a huge no-no with precedent being set that even using 4 seconds of someone else's recording is a violation and will land you in hot water. My suspicion is that the people at Glee figured that as long as they stomped all over indies and relative unknowns that they could keep doing this until the rating dropped enough to shut the show down.

As regard their using his arrangement, there's nothing illegal about that, as the license that granted him the ability to create and perform the cover gives all rights to that back to the original artist, making it part and parcel with that for anyone who comes along later to use in their own cover. That doesn't make it wrong, just not actionable.